John Sebastian’s combo The Lovin’ Spoonful was a folk-pop crossover in the mid-1960s, but by 1968 he was ready to strike out on his own. He had been around the New York folk scene since the early years of the decade, and had a lot of connections and a lot of musical ideas that didn’t fit in the framework of the band. In fact, as Richie Unterberger points out in his excellent historical notes in the booklets of these Collectors’ Choice re-releases, Sebastian was one of the first of the rock-era bandleaders to get the solo singer-songwriter bug. He had his debut album ready to go in 1968, but due to contractual disputes with his former label, it didn’t come out until 1970, when singer-songwriters were common as hippies in Haight-Ashbury (or guitar-pickers in Nashville, for that matter).
Still, John B. Sebastian was a revelation and a breath of fresh air. It gave us studio versions of a couple of songs that a very stoned Sebastian sang on the Woodstock soundtrack album: the opening track, “I Had A Dream Last Night,” a lightweight bit of hippie utopianism; and the country-rock “Rainbows All Over Your Blues,” with the great Buddy Emmons on steel guitar. The album jacket was also full of photos of Sebastian (in bright tie-dye) playing and goofing with Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Dallas Taylor at Woodstock, and especially photos of John playing in front of the hundreds of thousands at that epochal event. As with Richie Havens, he wasn’t even on the schedule to play, but they needed somebody with an acoustic to entertain the crowd while they swept the rain puddles off of the stage between sets (according to Unterberger).
The rest of the album is all over the map, stylistically. There are rockers like the opening track “Red-Eye Express,” “What She Thinks About” and the funky “Baby, Don’t Ya Get Crazy” with its soulful horn charts and organ. “She’s A Lady” is a simple folk love song, “You’re A Big Boy Now” echoes the Lovin’ Spoonful style, “Magical Connection” is lounge pop complete with vibraphone (was anybody else using vibes in 1970?); “How Have You Been” is a peace-love-groovy hippie ballad; “The Room Nobody Lives In” is atmospheric chamber pop that has since been covered by Mama Cass and Elvis Costello; and “Fa-Fana-Fa” may be the only instrumental of the rock 
era featuring an ocarina. In other words, it’s a perfect mirror of ’60s music in its eclectic blend of folk, pop and rock styles, and melodically some of Sebastian’s strongest writing.
Sebastian in the ’70s was strongly influenced by Caribbean music. The title track of 1971’s The Four Of Us, which took up one whole side of the vinyl album, was a rambling travelogue that took Sebastian and his three companions to Domenica, among other places. (That album, not reviewed here, is also available as a Collectors’ Choice reissue.) He kicks off 1972’s Tarzana Kid with a cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting In Limbo,” from that year’s breakout reggae movie The Harder They Come. But this album is another example of Sebastian’s mynah-bird tendencies to collect and explore lots of different styles. Here, in spite of the title that hints at California, the leaning is strongly toward Southern rock, including a cover of Little Feat’s “Dixie Chicken,” with the song’s writer, Lowell George, and Emmylou Harris singing backing vocals. George also plays guitar here and on Sebastian’s re-write or co-write of “Face of Appalachia.” This track and several others also draw on the talents of David Grisman on mandolin. Other session players include steel guitarist Buddy Emmons (again), top session drummer Jim Gordon, and Ry Cooder on slide guitar and some hot mandolin (“Wild About My Lovin’ “). Phil Everly adds his vocals to one track (“Stories We Could Tell”) and the Pointer Sisters do their thing on “Friends Again.”
Although it lacks the rocking energy of the debut album, Tarzana Kid comes close to being his best, at least in terms of song selection. But in several key moments, the arrangements sabotage things, including the string charts on “Stories,” which was covered and improved upon by Jimmy Buffett, and “Harpoon,” the instrumental harmonica jam that closes the 
disc; a too-reverent cover of “Wildwood Flower” with Sebastian on autoharp and Grisman on mandolin; and the two lazy blues numbers, “Singing The Blues” and a Spoonful cover, “The Sporting Life,” both of which take no chances.
Welcome Back was an album hurried out in 1976 to capitalize on Sebastian’s surprise (and final) hit single, the title song from the popular sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. It was the last John Sebastian album I ever bought, too. After a few weeks of listening to it that summer, I filed it away to never play it again, because it just wasn’t that interesting. This chance to revisit it 30 years later shows why.
As Unterberger gets Sebastian to admit in the liner notes, it was indeed cobbled together in a hurry to cash in on the single’s success. Sebastian is quoted as saying that some of the songs weren’t really fleshed out as well as they could have been with a bit more time in the studio. It also is apparent at this remove that none of the other tracks sound at all like the title song, which was recorded with an entirely different set of musicians.
He continues in his Caribbean vein on Welcome Back with several tracks: The opening “Hideaway,” with a reggae-disco beat; “You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine,” and the jokey “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” with steel-drum percussion, and keyboardist Michael Omartian on the ARP synthesizer. The song sounds like a Jimmy Buffet imitation, but it was written by John Charles Lewis, who Sebastian says was a cousin of his, in the early ’60s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARP_Instruments
Elsewhere, there are some pop crooners, like “She’s Funny,” set to a slow swamp-pop rhythm, and a loungey cover of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Didn’t Wanna Have To Do It.” He also covers another Spoonful song, “Warm Baby.” And “A Song A Day In Nashville” is something of a followup to “Nashville Cats,” a bit of outsider country which is pretty pale in comparison to the earlier single. All that’s left is “I Needed Her Most When I Told Her To Go,” which tells its whole story right there in the title (another song that begs for a Costello cover), and the final track, a string-laden harmonica instrumental called “Let This Be Our Time To Get Along,” on which Sebastian sings the title twice at the end of the final verse. As I mentioned, it needs more fleshing out.
And that was the end of John Sebastian’s solo recording career until the 1990s, when he benefitted from the roots revival and came back fronting a jug band, among other guises. He was one of those musicians who, after initial success with a band, floundered through various attempts at a solo career, always on the fringes, never quite breaking through. In some ways, it was the fault of things over which he had little control, including the many vicissitudes of the recording industry, bad luck, bad timing. From the vantage point of 30 years later, though, it’s also plain that his half-octave singing range was a weakness, and his material wasn’t quite as strong as that of many of his contemporaries. These albums are enjoyable as exercises in nostalgia, but not a whole lot more.
Kudos to Unterberger’s liner notes, but I’ll echo my compatriot David Kidney’s complaints about Collectors’ Choice’s habit of shrinking the original album cover down to CD-booklet size. The original lyrics are all but impossible to read.
(Collectors’ Choice, 2006; Reprise, 1970)
(Collectors’ Choice, 2006; Reprise, 1972)
(Collectors’ Choice, 2006; Reprise, 1976)
[Update: I encourage all fans to listen to this 2019 episode of Slate’s Hit Parade by the masterful Chris Molanphy. Entitled “We Are Stardust, We Are Gold-Certified,” it details which Woodstock artists’ careers Woodstock benefitted the most from it.]
